Re: Promotion of standby to master

On Jun 29, 2012, at 12:16 PM, Andy Chambers wrote:

> I understand that it's possible to promote a "hot standby" pg server
> simply by creating the failover file. In a scenario where there are
> multiple standby servers, is it possible to point the other standby
> servers to the new master without creating a new base backup?
>
> When I tried to do this, I ran into the "timeline 2 of the primary
> does not match recovery target timeline 1". I'm just trying to figure
> out if that's because the procedure I followed to promote the standby
> was wrong or because it's just not possible.

On your slaves, you need to have the line:

recovery_target_timeline=latest

This allows the slaves to notice that a new timeline has started and move to it. The one gotcha is that you have to make sure to promote a slave which is most ahead in terms of replication; otherwise, if you promote a slave which is further behind than another slave, and that could cause you grief when the lagging slave tries to replicate from the new master.